I've looked through our historic data here, and this error message has only cropped up once before. Unfortunately, the customer on that occasion never responded to our request for more detail so we never discovered it.

Thinking at the time was that is potentially a problem in the .net framework, but could you give a little more information:

- What exact version of SQL Data Compare are you using?
- Does this occur when working with two actual databases, or are you using script folders?
- Does the process succeed if you let SQL Data Compare perform the update (as opposed to generating a script)?
- Do your database(s) use any unusual collation?
- What do you have set in Tools > Application Options under the Synchronization Scripts Encoding option? Do any other options here work?

If you want to contact us directly to work through this, please mail us directly at support@red-gate.com, quoting F0045000 in the subject line.

v8.0.2.5Both databases are in the same instance.Yes, SQL Compare does synchronise the DB's as opposed to when it tries to generate the script(s).It is a client's DB that has been live since ~SQL2000 and is currently running in a SQL 2008 environment. There are no unusual collations. There are ~1.5million rows.Current encoding is set to UTF16. I will try some of the others in the mean time.

OK - it may also be worth turning up the logging to "verbose" to see if it gives anything more specific.

To do this, right-click the main SQL Data Compare window titlebar, and select Min Logging Level > Verbose.
Restart the app and generate your error, then check the log by right clicking once more on the titlebar and picking "Locate Log Files", then opening the most recent one.